Databricks

Sr. Manager, Engineering Configuration Platform Team

Databricks$222K — $300K *
Information Technology
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5+ years managing backend or infrastructure teams of 7 to 15 engineers in service frameworks or feature flags.
  • Strong background in distributed systems and infrastructure including Java/Scala services and multi-cloud deployments.
  • Hands-on engineering manager who leads design reviews and collaborates technically with the team.
  • Proven ability to manage, grow, and retain high-performing teams.
  • Familiarity with operational responsibilities for high-availability platforms including incident response and reliability improvements.
  • Experience in shaping user experiences and rollout policies for developers, emphasizing safety and speed.
  • BS in Computer Science; Master’s or higher preferred.

Responsibilities

  • Lead a team to influence how Databricks engineers deploy and manage changes daily.
  • Implement stronger guardrails and validation to reduce customer-impacting incidents from configuration changes.
  • Drive improvements in median time to recovery (MTTR) through automated mitigation strategies and features.
  • Enhance the user experience of the Configuration Platform, facilitating seamless and intuitive change management.
  • Grow the engineering team, attracting top technical talent while fostering leadership development.

Benefits

  • Comprehensive benefits package tailored to employee needs.
  • Equity opportunities as part of the compensation.
  • Eligible for an annual performance bonus.
  • Flexible work arrangements to support work-life balance.
  • Professional development programs to nurture career growth.
Full Job Description
RDQ427R368

The Configuration Platform team owns the systems that move configuration and feature flags across every Databricks service. The platform decouples code deployment from feature enablement for thousands of internal engineers, transports configuration across AWS, Azure, and GCP to every Databricks compute surface, and serves 25,000+ active flags and over 300 million evaluations per second at ~10 p95 latency. It is the primary lever Databricks uses to safely roll out changes, run experiments, and mitigate incidents in minutes instead of hours.

Were looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to lead a team within the Configuration Platform organization. This is a hands-on leadership role that combines deep distributed systems judgment with strong people leadership, driving multi-quarter strategy on one of Databricks most critical stability primitives while continuing to raise the bar for how engineers across the company ship change safely.

The impact you will have:
  • You will lead a team that directly shapes how thousands of Databricks engineers ship, ramp, and roll back changes every day
  • You will reduce the rate and blast radius of customer-impacting incidents caused by configuration and feature changes, through stronger guardrails, validation, and graduated rollout patterns
  • You will close the loop between bad change and automated mitigation, driving company-wide MTTR down through investments in health-mediated releases, auto-rollback, and zero-downtime configuration delivery
  • You will evolve the Configuration Platform user experience into a frictionless, opinionated set of surfaces (UI, CLI, agentic) where engineers author, review, and roll out changes safely without thinking about the internals
  • You will grow the team into a Staff and Principal attracting org whose technical decisions shape how the company balances speed and reliability

What we look for:
  • 5+ years managing backend, infrastructure, or platform teams of roughly 7 to 15 engineers, ideally in service frameworks, feature flags, configuration systems, release safety, production reliability, or other internal platforms
  • Strong distributed systems and infrastructure background: Java/Scala services, RPC and routing layers, configuration systems, Kubernetes-based microservices, and multi-cloud or multi-region deployments
  • Hands-on EM disposition: stays close to the code, leads design reviews, and contributes technically alongside the team. Comfortable leveraging AI-assisted coding tools to amplify their own and the team s output
  • Demonstrated track record managing, growing, and retaining high performing teams
  • Comfortable partnering with senior+ engineers on design reviews, roadmap, and cross-team execution while letting strong ICs own technical details
  • Operational experience owning a high-availability platform with on-call, incident response, and measurable reliability improvements
  • Demonstrated product thinking for developers: shaping opinionated UX, rollout policies, and developer workflows that make the safe path the easy path, with strong taste on the safety versus velocity tradeoff
  • BS in Computer Science (Masters or higher level of education preferred)

COVID-19 Vaccination Requirement

As a federal government contractor, Databricks requires new U.S. employees to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19. Proof of vaccination will be required as a condition of employment. Databricks will make reasonable accommodations based on medical conditions or religious grounds for qualified candidates in accordance with applicable law.

Pay Range Transparency

Databricks is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices. The pay range(s) for this role is listed below and represents the expected salary range for non-commissionable roles or on-target earnings for commissionable roles. Actual compensation packages are based on several factors that are unique to each candidate, including but not limited to job-related skills, depth of experience, relevant certifications and training, and specific work location. Based on the factors above, Databricks anticipates utilizing the full width of the range. The total compensation package for this position may also include eligibility for annual performance bonus, equity, and the benefits listed above. For more information regarding which range your location is in visit our page here.

Local Pay Range

$222,000-$300,000 USD

BenefitsAt Databricks, we strive to provide comprehensive benefits and perks that meet the needs of all of our employees. For specific details on the benefits offered in your region click here.

About Databricks

Databricks is a unified analytics platform that provides data engineering, collaborative data science, and machine learning capabilities. The company was founded in 2013 by the original creators of Apache Spark, a popular open-source big data processing engine. Databricks provides a cloud-based platform that allows data teams to collaborate and build data pipelines, run machine learning models, and perform advanced analytics. The company has raised over $1 billion in funding and is valued at $38 billion as of November 2021.
Learn more about Databricks
Size
2,000 employees
Industry
Founded
2013

Similar Jobs

More Jobs at Databricks

More Information Technology Jobs

Find similar Sr. Manager, Engineering Configuration Platform Team jobs: